


Kill and Run

by unicornpoe



Series: (I'm) One of the Dirty Guns [1]
Category: Knives Out (2019)
Genre: Additional Information in Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Marta Cabrera Is the Best Human, Marta is the boss my dudes, Phone Calls & Telephones, Power Dynamics, Ransom Drysdale Is A Thot, Rated For Language and Violence and Murdery Stuff, Road Trips, Slow Burn, The Author Regrets Everything, The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known, because i am me, touching hands like this is a fucking joe wright film, unexpected tenderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-24 17:01:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22041358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unicornpoe/pseuds/unicornpoe
Summary: “I think I’m going to try to apologize to you," he said. "I just thought you should be prepared.”*Or: Marta can't tell Ransom to go.
Relationships: Marta Cabrera/Ransom Drysdale
Series: (I'm) One of the Dirty Guns [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1588981
Comments: 93
Kudos: 878
Collections: Knives Out





	Kill and Run

**Author's Note:**

> hi! i'm human trash. 
> 
> i saw this movie and i was like hmm marta deserves to boss ransom around and then i sat down and wrote 16k of eye sex and emotion porn in like four days which is the story of my entire life. i blame the absolutely brilliant fic "Knives In" by ao3 user anomalation for making me realize that maybe these two kooky kids are good for each other in a way that doesn't oNLY involve porn in the first place, and then i just blame myself and satan for continuing on in that vein and writing this monstrosity. 
> 
> A FEW IMPORTANT THINGS BEFORE YOU BEGIN: 
> 
> 1\. fran is not dead in this fic.  
> 2\. i am operating on an altered plane of existence in which ransom knew that wheel of knives was fake and stabbed marta anyway, knowing he couldn't kill her with it. this is the only way i can allow this ship to happen. please shut up. this puts my poor sinful heart at rest.  
> 3\. basically he's the worst murderer in the world. pathetic.  
> 4\. otherwise he's still the same dickhead that we all love to hate and want to slap.  
> 5\. god has forsaken me. 
> 
> CW for: violence (lite), derogatory language, mentions of racism, and lots of talk about murder/death.

A year after Harlan Thrombey’s death, Marta got a call. 

“I knew the knife was fake,” Ransom said. “They’re all fake in that goddamn eyesore. I knew I couldn’t kill you.”

Marta sat down on the edge of the chair in Harlan’s old study, and pressed the phone to her ear. 

Ransom wasn’t lying. The centerpiece of knives, fanning out like a lethal sun—none of it was real. All props. All for show. She had known for almost a year now.

“Anyway,” said Ransom, and he sounded the same but different, too. The edges of his voice were strained like they never had been before. Marta closed her eyes, and hoped he wasn’t happy. “I finally grew the balls to tell you. You probably already know.”

Marta Cabrera had not spoken to Ransom Drysdale since that day, since that moment right before a collapsible plastic knife folded itself neatly against her breastbone. She did not want to be speaking to him now. 

But while she had him. 

“Why did you do it,” Marta said carefully, weighing each word well before she spoke it, “if you knew it wouldn’t matter?”

Ransom was quiet. That was something Marta was unused to from him: quietness. Maybe they had him in solitary. Nothing but him and his smirks and his spinning, wheeling thoughts. 

“Well,” he said finally. Tight-edged, wearier. Unapologetic—and only that made sense. “I didn’t like you very much.”

It was a straight answer, as much as anything he said. 

“You called me a bitch.”

Something that might have been a laugh. “Yeah.” More quiet. Marta could hear the way her own heart pounded. “I say such stupid shit in the heat of the moment, don’t I? I should have called you a liar. Guess that wouldn’t have worked, though.”

That was what made her mad. She hung up on him, hands shaking a little, and sat staring at the wall for a very long time. 

  
  


Mama was in the kitchen as she so often was. This was her space now: rife with the scents of the things she loved to cook, and sunlight dappled at a certain time of day, this kitchen was so unlike how it was when this was Harlan’s house that Marta almost didn’t recognize it anymore. 

That was fine by her. 

Mama didn’t see her, humming as she was to a song Marta didn’t know, back turned as she flipped something spicy-sweet in a pan on the stove. That was fine, too. Marta wasn’t sure she could talk right now anyway. She took a seat. 

Six months ago, Marta had finally gotten through to one of the lawyers that had been willed to her, finally gotten all of Mama’s papers in order. She was documented now. She didn’t have a thing to worry about. She ran a catering business out of this kitchen, her kitchen, and Marta was happy for her. 

“Ah, _mija_ , you scared me.” Her eyes were wide and her voice was breathy but she was smiling. She grabbed a little jar off of the spice rack by her head, and the pan continued to sizzle. “Everything ok?”

Marta thought about lying. But she wasn’t close enough to the sink. 

“Sorry, Mama,” she said. That much was true. She should have called out when she came in; Mama had been jumpy ever since they moved in here, worried that a Thrombey would show up, or a police officer, or deportation. “Ransom called.”

She sat the spice jar down hard on the counter. 

“Did you answer?” Mama demanded. Her accent was always there, that fluid lilt to her words, but it got crisper when she was upset. Deeper. “Tell me you did not answer that man.”

“I answered, Mama,” said Marta, and hoped that her mother would not ask why. She wouldn’t be able to answer the question if she did, for Marta didn’t know herself. “It was…” she searched for a word. Found it surprisingly easy to grasp one. “Fine.”

Mama’s eyes were hard, her jaw set. She wasn’t angry at Marta, that much Marta knew; still. Marta found herself sitting up a little straighter, lifting her chin a little higher. 

“He told me that he knew the knife was fake. Which I’m already aware of.”

This was truthful too. Marta had been at Ransom’s trial, despite the urging from her lawyers not to go—she had a restraining order against the man, after all. He would have killed her, after all. 

She’d gone anyway. Dressed nice, in clothes bought with money that was not his and never would be. Sat in the back, and listened to the proceedings. 

Marta hadn’t been surprised when Ransom pled not guilty to the intention of murdering her, or when he said that he knew about the prop knife display. He’d practically grown up in this house, or so Harlan always said; he knew all the secret passages, all the hidden quirks. 

He’d _wanted_ to kill her though. And wasn’t that practically the same thing?

“I don’t want you talking to that man again,” Mama said. Clipped tone, short words. The voice she had built up over her years of hardship, the voice she used instead of crying. “Understand?”

Marta opened her mouth to say _I won’t,_ but her stomach roiled. She took her mother’s hand, and hoped her own wasn’t shaking.

“I understand.”

  
  


Hugh Ransom Drysdale was sentenced to five years in prison for two cases of attempted murder and one case of arson. It would have been longer, but even cut out of the will, his parents were rich enough to throw money at a son they didn’t love. 

  
  
  


Marta sat in the study, looking at the matte gray square of sky outside. 

It was possible, she thought, that she should have reserves about spending as much of her time in this room as she did. It was where Harlan had died; it was where she had thought she killed him; it was where Ransom had switched those vials. 

But all of Harlan’s blood had been cleaned out from between the floorboards and she’d replaced the settee he bled out on with a stately velvet armchair, and anyway, she had more good memories of this room than she did bad. 

It looked a bit different than it had when Harlan lived here, just slightly left-of-center in a way that wasn’t discernable unless you were as familiar with this place as Marta was—just like every other room here. She had found, when she began to clean the house out, that she didn’t much want to get rid of anything. She _liked_ Harlan’s accumulated clutter, his obscure odds and ends. His prop knives, his gauche wallpaper, his strange statuettes and his books. 

Especially his books. 

She was working her way through them. Two-hundred and twenty-seven volumes, all full-length novels except for a rather experimental one somewhere in the middle (short stories, she’d heard, though she hadn’t gotten to them yet), all completely unique. Marta hadn’t had much time for things like reading for pleasure after she graduated school, after she was hired on to be Harlan’s nurse. 

But she had money now. And money meant time. 

These were some of the things she had learned this year. 

The phone rang just as Marta was getting to the good part. Moonlight, heathered moors, a gun hidden among tall sea grass. She pulled herself away with effort. 

Marta looked at the phone. 

It was still the same one that Harlan had always had. The one she tried to save him with. Shiny and black, neat white buttons. It shook a little in its cradle as it rang, and Marta thought of a night long ago, old hands shaking a Go board. Enforced natural disaster. 

She picked it up. 

There was silence for a while, and Marta didn’t feel particularly inclined to break it. She knew who this was. She knew it as surely as she knew that she didn’t care if he was uncomfortable. 

After a moment, the even rhythm of breathing on the other line shifted into something a little shorter, a little blunter: a huff, like maybe he was laughing, or maybe he was frustrated. 

“It’s me.”

Marta could picture his face. The way he would be smirking like he did, horrible and charming and halfway beautiful. The way his eyes would rest on her, heavy-lidded and dismissive and amused. 

She wondered if he still looked the same. 

“I know you probably don’t want to talk to me,” he began, and Marta leaned back in her armchair, closed the book, set it aside. He was right: she didn’t want to talk to him. 

“Smart, awful boy,” she muttered. 

Ransom’s breath went dead on the other end of the call. Maybe he’d dropped the phone, or—or maybe he’d dropped dead himself, right there in prison, smirk still frozen onto his cold lips, a rictus of the Ransom who hated her so much immobilized forever. 

It kicked back in. Ah, damn. Still alive. 

“‘Course I am,” he said. Shaky, although that could have simply been the connection. Marta let her eyes fall closed. “Never underestimate a guy who can Agatha Christie his way into a prison cell.”

Marta’s skin felt too tight, her eyes too hot. God, he was arrogant. “You think you’re the author in this situation?” she snapped. 

“What was it Harlan said?” The question was rhetorical; it if wasn’t, Marta would bully it into being so. “We’re all authors of our own lives; some of us just write it down.”

“Yours is a disappointing story.”

Ransom laughed. Out loud, this time, deep and full, and with her eyes closed and with that laugh in her ear, it was easy to imagine he was sitting across from her. Long legs sprawled out on the carpet, one of those dishevelled, expensive sweaters clinging to him. A knife balanced across his knuckles. 

“Maybe; but sweetheart, we still don’t know the ending.”

Playing life like a game. That’s what Ransom Drysdale did; that’s what he was continuing to do from prison. 

“Why are you calling me?” Marta asked. 

Ransom hummed. “Who else would I call?”

“Not the woman you tried to kill.”

“I didn’t try to kill you,” Ransom said, and Marta was surprised into sitting up at the conviction in his voice. The determination. He sounded… frayed. And she had done it to him. 

She smiled, and then quickly wiped it away, like maybe he could somehow peer into her house and see. 

“I tried to threaten you,” Ransom continued, “I tried to scare you. I tried to… I didn’t try to kill you.”

Not much of a distinction, considering he _had_ tried to kill two other people. Still, Marta didn’t hang up the phone. 

“Now those other two,” Ransom said, and lightness was back in his voice again, bright as springtime, old money and cockiness dripping from his vowels. “Let’s just say scaring them was a bonus.”

How long would he sit here and talk to her without even needing her to talk back? How long, Marta wondered, had he been wanting to do this?

“As for my family,” Ransom said, “which I know you were going to suggest—I may be in prison but I’m not in hell yet, and I don’t want to bring that upon myself for at least another forty years or so.”

She probably spoke to his family more than he did, then, and she tended to avoid that at all costs. Even Meg, who, while certainly not the worst of them, _had_ given up possibly Marta’s most important secret of all. It was just difficult not to speak to them when they were all currently suing her—futilely, she was assured, but. Still. 

Marta couldn’t decide if that was sad or not. Ransom didn’t deserve his family, or they didn’t deserve him, or they all deserved each other… there was a thought in there. It would emerge eventually. 

“Anyway. I’m not sure if you’re even still there, and there’s a guard staring at me like he wants to cave my head in, so.” 

He stopped talking. This pause was expectant, was pregnant: he wanted her to speak. 

She didn’t care what he wanted. 

Static rustled gently between them, almost the same tone as the wind buffering trees outside. 

He hung up eventually. 

  
  
  


Blanc still called her with cases upon occasion, and usually she obliged him. They were always interesting, and she always wanted to: someone strangled with a telephone cord in Texas, someone eaten alive by seven chihuahuas in Orlando with nothing but a pinky toe to go off of—all unsolvable. Until Blanc showed up, of course. 

He almost always came to her. Not because she didn’t want to travel—she did—and not because she wasn’t interested—she was—but because Marta just didn’t feel comfortable leaving her mother alone in the house so long. Not with Jacob still regularly subtweeting them in racist and semi-threatening Twitter threads; not with Meg still demanding more money each week, with rapidly decreasing politeness; not with Walt and Linda and Richard and Donna and Joni openly suing her in a case that was moments away from getting ugly. 

Blanc seemed to understand without Marta having to explain herself. She appreciated this. 

Today, Blanc called her as she signed Meg’s monthly check. She put down the pen gratefully to answer. 

“Good afternoon, Miss Cabrera,” said Blanc in his pleasant drawl. “Would you by any chance like to hypothesize as to what I am currently looking at?”

“Hm,” said Marta, sitting back in her chair. “Is it dead?”

“Oh you are good,” said Blanc. He was clearly in a good mood; murder tended to do that to him. Marta needed to reconsider the people she associated with. “Anything else to add, ma’am, or are you content to let me fill in the blanks?”

“Do your worst,” Marta smiled. 

“I believe I will,” Blanc said, and began to speak.

  
  
  


Meg liked to pretend that she and Marta were friends. That had always been something she did: _I’ll take care of you. They’re all assholes. You’re so much more than what they say._

Marta had always wanted to believe it. Wanting and doing were two different things, though. 

“Hey babe,” Meg said now, a smile clear in her voice over the crackling phone connection. Marta had never hated her before—she didn’t even hate her now; Marta didn’t hate anyone, wasn’t sure that was an emotion she could make herself feel—had even liked her, as much as she could like any of them. She didn’t like her anymore. “How are you?”

“I’m alright, Meg,” said Marta. She didn’t say _good,_ she wasn’t _good:_ she was sitting at the breakfast table sipping a cup of coffee and reading an email Alan had sent her about how to win the case the Thrombey’s had brought up against her in civil court. _Your mother wants all of my money,_ she thought about saying. _Your mother and your whole family and you, Meg._ “How’s Africa?”

“Oh, it’s great, you’d love it,” Meg said. She was studying abroad in Senegal. That’s all Marta knew. “Everyone here is so poor. It really makes you think about privilege in a whole new way.”

Marta almost choked on her coffee. “Huh,” she said faintly. 

“Anyway,” said Meg brightly, and Marta thought about the times Meg had defended Marta from her family by talking over her, by bringing attention to her, by not letting her speak. She didn’t actually think that Meg ever knew where Marta was from, either. “I know this is, like, gross to ask you, but this trip wasn’t covered by my scholarship, and I don’t want Mom to have to worry…”

Meg was so young. So much younger, it seemed, than Marta had ever been allowed to be. 

“I’ll take care of it, Meg,” Marta said. Only a little weariness snuck into her voice. This was what Harlan would have wanted. This was the right thing to do. “Don’t worry.”

“God, thanks,” Meg said. Genuine relief colored her tone. She had absolutely no idea how else to get money, Marta realized. She wondered if Meg had ever had a job. She wondered if Ransom had ever had a job. “You’re the best.”

Meg talked for a few more minutes. Idle things that Marta didn’t really have to put much thought into responding to. Now that she had her money, Meg didn’t have to worry about what to say. 

“Meg,” Marta began before the other girl hung up. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure, babe.”

Marta didn’t like when she said that. 

“About Ransom.”

A pause. Meg didn’t like to talk about him, or think about him. None of the family did. He was a disgrace, an embarrassment; not, Marta thought, because he had killed Harlan, but because he had been caught. 

Marta was fairly sure that she already had her answer. She was going to ask anyway. 

“Ok,” said Meg slowly. 

“Do you ever talk to him? You or Joni?”

Silence again. 

“Well,” said Meg. “He tried to kill you.”

No. He hadn’t. “He tried to kill Fran,” Marta said. “He basically killed Harlan.”

“There you go,” said Meg, snapping a little. 

Marta didn’t react. “So that’s a no,” she said. 

“Why do you care?”

Marta thought about it. Tipped her head to the side, and stared at the place where the ceiling met the wall. It was dusty. Maybe they should hire a maid. “He called me,” she said finally. _Who else would I call?_ “And I didn’t know why.”

Meg scoffed. “Because he’s a dick.”

“Yeah,” Marta said, and stood to carry her cup over to the sink. “Maybe.”

  
  
  


He called her again in a couple of weeks. 

“You should sell the rights to _A Murder on the Seine,_ ” he said instead of hello. “It’s one of his most popular books, and a movie would be fantastic, and you’d gain billionaire status from that alone.”

“I don’t want to gain billionaire status,” said Marta. She was dusting behind the books on the shelf in her study, and she had to climb up onto the ottoman to do it. 

“‘Course you do,” said Ransom impatiently. “Plus—”

“No,” said Marta. She stopped dusting. Grabbed the phone with her other hand. “I don’t.”

Ransom considered this for a moment. “No,” he said finally. “You wouldn’t, would you?”

“Plus Harlan didn’t want his works adapted. You know that.”

She could practically hear him rolling his eyes. “Marta.”

“What?” She asked. Annoyed. “I want to respect his wishes.”

“You’re just disgustingly nice, aren’t you?”

“It would be very easy for me,” said Marta, “to hang up this phone.”

“Right,” said Ransom. He sighed. “That book isn’t any good, anyway. People only liked it because everyone’s a Francophile.”

Marta, who had just finished reading _A Murder on the Seine,_ was annoyed to find herself agreeing with him. It was good, because Harlan was a good author, but it certainly wasn’t his best. Too contrived. 

“Everyone’s a critic, too,” she said at last. She stepped off of the ottoman and then sat down upon it, letting the duster fall to her lap. “I’m sure he’d value your revue,” she said dryly.

“Oh, he knew what I thought about it.” There was something in Ransom’s voice that sounded like he was smiling. Marta didn’t know what to make of it. “He liked when I insulted his books. Made him laugh. I was always right, anyway.”

Marta thought of Harlan and Ransom and what she’d witnessed between the two of them over the years. Theirs was a strange relationship: constantly challenging each other, playing games with their words that nobody else understood. She didn’t find it hard to believe that Ransom’s criticism might be one of those games, too. 

“So how’s being an heiress?” Ransom asked, after she’d taken too long to think about everything. 

Marta leaned back against the shelf. A book pressed into her spine, but she didn’t move. 

“Never a dull moment,” she said. 

“Oh yeah?”

“Not when you’re inheriting money from who I’m inheriting money from.”

Ransom laughed. “And yet,” he said, “I think they’re probably happier with you getting all this than they would have been if I had.”

Marta wondered if that was true. A family so steeped in hatred and bitterness that they’d rather have one of their own members locked up out of sight than getting the fortunes they thought should be theirs. 

She almost wished that was what’d happened. That Harlan had left everything to Ransom, and none of these events had ever taken place, and Marta didn’t have this house and this family and this money on her shoulders. 

But then Mama wouldn’t be documented. And Alicia wouldn’t be able to afford school. 

And Marta wouldn’t be here in this study on the phone. 

“Meg told me that she doesn’t talk to you because you tried to kill me.”

He snorted aloud at that. “Meg doesn’t talk to me because she’s a crazy irresponsible child who thinks that believing in socialism will get her free school and street cred,” he said. “And she knows that’s my opinion of her.”

Marta smiled. “So she _doesn’t_ care that you tried to kill me?”

Ransom started to speak. “I didn’t—” but then she heard him catch the word in his throat as he realized what she was doing. “You’re hilarious,” he said flatly. 

“That’s what I’ve always been told.”

“No wonder the old man loved you,” he added, musing a bit. There was something soft in his voice that made Marta furrow her brow. “I bet you could beat him at his own games.”

Marta didn’t play games, not the kind Ransom and Harlan loved so much. Marta did what she thought was best. Marta helped where she could. 

“Just Go,” said Marta. “That’s something we share.”

Ransom was quiet for a moment. Marta could feel his mood changing, sense it down the line. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Guess in the end he still liked you more than me though, didn’t he?”

  
  
  


Hugh Ranson Drysdale was up for parole in a couple of months. He was going to get out. Marta knew he was. 

When she thought about that, even if it was the middle of the night, she got up and made sure that all the doors and windows were locked, and that the gun beneath her pillow was loaded. Just in case. 

She sat sideways in the window seat now, a cup of coffee in one hand, the phone in the other, the loaded gun between her feet. 

The day outside was still gray, grizzled and windblown and unfriendly behind sheltering panes of glass. Rain spat against the windows like bullets, a gale shook the eaves, thunder peeled over the steeped black roof in rolicking rolls that drowned out the barking of the dogs curled up across the room by the fire. 

Ransom was talking. 

“I’m bored,” he said. “It’s boring. This shithole is full of rich illiterate cocksuckers who can’t last a couple of days without scooping out their daddy’s pockets to fund their cocaine addictions.” 

Marta refrained from pointing out that Ransom was a rich illiterate cocksucker who couldn’t last a couple of days without scooping out his daddy’s pocket to fund his cocaine addiction because she thought she might puke if she said the words, because apparently she didn’t fully believe them. That unsettled her into silence. 

“I’ve been in here for a year,” he said. “A year. Four left. By the time you see me again, I’ll have gray fucking hair. Oh _fuck_ me.” 

Marta was getting good at knowing what his voice meant, even when his words said a different thing. Today, though; today, everything about him was in unison. 

He was very desperately losing his mind. 

Ransom called her frequently. A couple of times a week, at least. Sometimes she answered, and they talked for his allotted time; sometimes she answered, and she let his thoughts unspool between them, and she never said a word; sometimes she didn’t answer at all. Sometimes she just let the phone ring. 

“Mom stopped visiting like eight months ago,” he said. His words were tumbling out a little faster than they should be now, spilling over each other, tangling up their edges. Marta thought of Ransom lying to her, trying to get her locked up; Marta thought about Ransom trying to kill Harlan, trying to kill Fran. Marta thought about what Harlan always said about Ransom: _There is so much of me in that kid: confident, stupid, playing life like a game._ “Which is fine, I hate her and she’s never made it a secret how much she hates me. Dad never came. Walt tried to bring that little Nazi fucker over, and I might be a psychopath, sure, I might be fucked up, but I don’t have any desire to reinstitute mass genocide.”

 _Oh how good of you,_ Marta thought dryly, and took a sip of coffee. 

“But there isn’t anything to do. I’m. I.” He stopped. Took a deep breath. It was harsh enough that Marta could hear it over the thunder this time. “I—”

“Ransom,” said Marta quietly. 

She hadn’t spoken to him at all yet today. There was a strange sort of power in sitting back and letting him ramble, in listening to the way he worked himself up, shattered and shattering after only one year. He was close to apologizing to her; she could tell. She would enjoy drawing that out of him. Perhaps that was mean, but she thought she deserved a little meanness. 

For now, though. Well. He was right. He had four more years. She shouldn’t let him go insane so soon. 

Ransom was silent. It was as if Marta had flicked an off switch on him, as if he had been talking and talking and talking only because she wasn’t. He was breathing fast. 

“Stop,” Marta said. She was surprised at the level of gentle command in her voice. If the Marta of two years ago knew that one day she would be bossing Ransom Drysdale around over the phone while he languished in prison, she would have lost her shit. “Your family isn’t going to visit you. They are terrible, and you ramble _and_ tried to kill the patriarch of the family. You are bored because you are in prison. You’re going to be bored. It’s a punishment. That’s the point. And gray hair is the least of your worries.”

She swallowed, and then took another sip of coffee to wet the sudden dryness in her throat. 

A little bit of time passed. Marta could hear Ransom, the familiar rise and fall of his breath, the soft rasp of fabric moving against fabric. A low murmur of voices in the background, like maybe he wasn’t alone. 

That was his world. Her world was this: a cozy room, a thunderstorm outside. Dogs by the fire. 

A bullseye of artificial knives in the center of it all. 

Ransom cleared his throat. “May I say something?” he asked, and his voice was stunningly muted. Low and mild and a little cowed. Hazy. Like he was coming down. 

“Go ahead,” Marta instructed him. “Don’t be an asshole.”

She expected another laugh at that, or a sharp quip. She got none. 

“Eventually,” he said, and he was quiet, and he was calm, “I think I’m going to try to apologize to you. I just thought you should be prepared.”

Surprisingly non-assholeish of him. And helpful. 

Is that all it took? Just telling him what to do?

“We’ll take care of that when we get to it,” said Marta, half-stunned herself, tipping her head back against the cool glass and fixing her eyes on the centermost point of that bullseye, that circle of negative space that every knife pointed to. “Wait until you mean it.”

They were quiet for the rest of the call. Eventually, Marta heard the click of Ransom hanging up, and then nothing.

She tossed the phone down by the gun. 

  
  
  


Alicia glared at Marta, arms crossed over her chest. 

“Oh,” said Marta, and wondered if she should smile. Probably not. “So you obviously think this is a bad idea.”

Alicia rolled her eyes heavenward—a gesture she’d gotten from Mama, as surely as she’d gotten her dark eyes and her predilection for being annoyed with Marta—and crossed the room. She dropped down heavily into the chair next to Marta, and took her hand. 

Alicia was home from college for Christmas. She hadn’t been here much longer than a week, and Marta had been careful about when and where she picked up the phone, but apparently she had slipped up. 

“No, Marta,” said Alicia, sounding weary and reluctantly amused and worried all at once. Sometimes it was hard to believe that she was the younger sister. “I don’t.”

“Well,” said Marta. She didn’t know why her face was so hot. She looked away. “It’s fine. He’s…”

“If you’re about to say that he’s calling you just because he’s lonely, Marta, I swear to god—”

“I wasn’t about to say that!” She hadn’t been. Even if it was clearly at least partly true. Anybody could be lonely, if they tried hard enough; even the rich-as-sin bastard grandsons of murdered men. “He’s just. You know. Ransom.”

Alicia was staring at her. “He tried to stab you in the heart,” she said flatly. 

“He didn’t,” said Marta. “He knew it wasn’t real.”

“He _wanted_ to stab you in the heart,” Alicia said, exasperated. 

That, Marta couldn’t argue. 

He said that he was going to apologize. Marta had predicted it, but still, it felt like more to hear him actually say it out loud. _I think I’m going to try to apologize to you. I thought you should be prepared._

Her, the woman that he hadn’t really tried to kill. 

Not his family. Not the children and the grandchildren of the man who had actually died.

Marta thought that maybe he meant it, and that was the scariest part. That he was willing to say he was sorry to her with as much emotion behind it as he was capable of, when he had been the reason his mother’s father committed suicide. 

_Who else would I call?_

“He likes to hear himself talk,” Marta said finally, squeezing Alicia’s hand between hers. The fire threw shadows up against the walls, tall and spindly and wildly dancing. “It isn’t hurting me.”

“He’s awful,” said Alicia. “He’s an awful, terrible, heartless man. He’s cruel. I hate him, and I don’t want you to have to put up with him.”

Marta drew Alicia close in response, draped an arm over her shoulders, distracted her with talk of Christmas and the charity dinner she apparently had to attend in a few weeks because she was rich now. 

She avoided having to agree out loud. She didn’t think she could. 

That made her just as sick as saying it. 

  
  
  


The charity dinner was boring, and successful. Marta wore another of those dresses she let herself buy with Thrombey money—Cabrera née Thrombey money, Alicia liked to say—and let herself feel good about the way she looked. Tall, in the heels she slipped on. Bright and beautiful. 

Expensive. 

Mama and Alicia were asleep by the time she got home, so she slipped the heels off and took the stairs as quietly as she could, holding the hem of her dress between two fingers so she didn’t wrinkle the fabric or stain it with sweat. 

There was a message waiting for her on the answering machine. She played it, half-sitting on the edge of the desk, nothing but moonlight showing her fingers which buttons to push. 

_“What’s up? It’s ten o’clock, and I’m bored.”_

She clenched the receiver a little tighter. Mama would have been asleep by then, Alicia nestled somewhere with AirPods and a drink. They wouldn’t have heard the phone. Good. 

Good. 

“ _Hope Walt isn’t giving you any trouble. If he is, let me know and I’ll kill him for you. Ha. Joke. Sort of. That guy’s an ass. Haven’t seen him him here since the look-at-my-Nazi-spawn incident, but he showed up today. Drunk. He must have paid them a lot to let him in.”_

Ransom’s voice was short, and thready, and unwinding, unwinding, unwinding. 

_“I’m a waste of space, apparently, and it’s my fault that you got the money. Also you were fucking Harlan, and my mother should never have given birth to me.”_ A pause. Ransom had been talking fast, but this pause was drawn out, was interminable. There was a reedy quality to his breath that made the nurse in Marta take note. “ _Anyway. I got into a fight today. Yes, those two stories are related. You guessed it. Walt can wield that cane like a motherfucker, by the way, but yours truly honed his fighting skills in private school locker rooms. I got a few good swings in._

_“I’m not supposed to assault people in prison, so let’s just say I’m not gonna win any popularity contests around this place any time soon. Not sure what’s going to happen to me. Probably nothing bad; Linda still has an obscene amount of money. God, I wish I were her._

_“Anyway. I don’t… know why I called you. I’m not actually allowed to do that either, did you know? You’ve got a restraining order against me. Smart woman. And it isn’t like you’ll worry—oh, what am I saying, maybe you will. Kind heart. Good person. That’s what Colonel Sanders always said about you, right? I guess he was smart too. He caught me._

_“Christ. My head hurts. Walt’s fucking cane is fucking titanium or something. He’s a prick. This whole family is full of pricks. Hope you don’t have to talk to them too much. See you when I see you, Marta. Kick some Thrombey ass for me.”_

The message ended. That was it. 

Marta played it again, fast, before she had time to let any thoughts crowd her head. 

Even talking about something like this he was flippant. Throwing the shallow details of something much bigger at her, barely putting scratches on the surface of what had really happened. 

_Kind heart. Good person._

He was manipulative, and an asshole, and self-serving. _He_ was a prick. She didn’t want him to be beaten over the head with a titanium cane, though. 

She didn’t really mind if Walt was. 

  
  
  


Marta hugged Mama and Alicia close at the door before sending them off down the front steps. 

“Be careful,” said Alicia before she ducked into the car, her eyes dark and serious. 

Marta just smiled and waved, blowing a kiss at Mama. She would not be careful. She was never careful. 

Ransom hadn’t called for two weeks. Marta supposed there was nothing to be careful of, if he was out of the picture. 

She went back inside. 

Mama was taking Alicia back to school, and then she was going to stay with her for a few days. Marta would be entirely by herself in the house for the first time… ever, actually. 

Huh. 

It was very quiet. 

She put some music on. There was a record player in many of the rooms; less because Harlan liked record players, and more because Harlan, while objectively the best of the lot, _was_ still a Thrombey, and this was his particular way of showing wealth. The accumulation of objects, big and small. 

But Marta put on a record—something old, jazzy, a big band medley that Harlan had liked to play—and that filled up some of the shadowy corners of the house, and pushed enough silence away that she felt ok curling up in her armchair to read. 

She lost herself again for a little while, swept up in dangerous heists, glittering diamonds worn around the necks of elegant ladies, slyly poisoned drinks and daggers slipped into thigh straps. Harlan’s writing was exceptional: Marta felt the plot of it all plummeting through her veins, setting her heart off into a gallop. 

The knock came at midnight. 

She froze. Residual adrenaline coursed through her from the book, and it doubled at the sound. Sharp and fast and precise, a rat-tat-tat, a drumroll. 

Marta grabbed her gun and cocked it. She stuck to the shadows as she crept down the stairs and through the hallway, and hated herself for playing that damn record so loudly. There was no question that she was here. 

The gun shook in her hand a little, despite her best efforts. She thought about Walt and his cane and the way he had threatened her in her own hallway, looming closeness and poisoned words. She thought of Linda, and the words she’d screamed, and the real coldness in her eyes. She thought of Jacob, his alt-right online presence, the fact that she was actually afraid of him—him, a little boy. A little white boy who was already more powerful than her. 

At least her family wasn’t here. At least they were gone, safe, across the state. 

Marta paused before she rounded the last corner, taking a breath so deep it pulled at her lungs. 

Then she lifted her gun, stalked across the foyer, and threw open the door. 

“Woah,” said Ransom, lifting his hands up to hover by his head. “You’re prepared.”

Marta couldn’t breathe. She was hot all over. 

She couldn’t tell what Ransom’s expression meant, didn’t know what she was supposed to be feeling. There he was: backed by the night sky, only the lamp in the hall shedding any light on him, looking at her more closely than he ever had before. 

Marta felt like a bug pinned beneath a microscope. Existing for him to study. 

“What the hell are you doing here?” she hissed. She was distantly proud that her hands weren’t shaking any longer, somewhere in the only corner of her mind that wasn’t screaming his name. 

“Is that thing loaded?” He tipped his head toward the gun but he didn’t lower his hands. _Smart, awful boy._ His eyelashes cast long, spiked shadows on his angular cheeks. “I’m intimidated either way.”

Marta wanted to—to hit him, to shoot him, maybe, to bring him inside and touch that place above the collar of his cheap t-shirt, that divot in his throat that leapt with a too-fast pulse. She thought about him stabbing her: she thought about his weight atop her, the way that had felt, all of him pressing her bone-by-bone into the forgiving carpet below. His eyes, so sharp-flat with anger that she almost hadn’t recognized him. 

“Shut up,” said Marta. She didn’t recognize her own voice: chilling, hollow where it poured out of her. Around them, entertwined with peeping shadows, the brassy music swelled. “And come inside. _Slowly._ Stay this same distance away from me the whole time, and shut the door behind you once you’re in.”

Ransom blinked, hands wavering a little. For a moment, he looked breathlessly tired—all of those shadows folded into the lines around his eyes—and Marta lowered the gun half an inch. 

“Put your hands down,” she said, almost gentle. Here he was, Ransom Drysdale in her foyer; here she was, Marta Cabrara with a gun pointed at his heart. “Come on.”

Ransom did. 

“Lock it.”

Ransom did. 

“I’m going to ask you again,” said Marta, low and slow and clear, and here he was, and she was terrified of all of this, terrified, but she didn’t think she hated him and she was willing to listen if he was willing to obey. “And I want you to tell the truth. Why are you here?”

He wasn’t smiling at her. Here, in the light, Marta could see the shape of the bruises around his eyes, the ridged row of new-skin-pink stitches at the edge of his shorn hairline. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. 

“I got parole instead of solitary,” he said. The smile came then: faint, stretched too tight. He tipped his head toward her again, and Marta realized that she’d lowered the gun completely—yet he was still simply standing there. Not coming any closer. “And anyway. Where else would I go?”

_Who else would I call? Where else would I go?_

“Is your head ok?” Marta asked. 

“Not great,” said Ransom, and looked at her, close, close. “But I’ll survive.”

“Well,” said Marta. “Good.”

Ransom raised his eyebrows. “Is it?”

“I don’t want you dead,” Marta said hotly. 

Ransom smiled again. It was softer this time, and that was worse. “You can’t lie,” he said. “Forgot.”

“You didn’t forget,” said Marta. In this moment, she was rebelliously brave. “You’ve never forgotten anything about me. You never will.”

He had bruises on his knuckles, too. She wondered what it was like to watch him fight. If it was natural to him, thrashing violence, or if he wore it awkwardly like an unfit sweater. Bruises pressing bruises into other people’s skin. 

Ransom hadn’t yet looked at her with anything like anger; he did now. “No,” he said, raspy like he didn’t want to admit it, like his own voice was trying to hold him back. “No.”

Marta nodded. The gun felt very heavy in her hands. 

“Sit down, Ransom.” She jerked her chin toward the bench and Ransom crossed to it dutifully, keeping his pre-prescribed distance. He sank down somewhat stiffly. Like maybe there were bruises in places that she couldn’t see. 

His eyes were colorless in the strange half-light as he looked up at her. 

“Don’t move,” said Marta, breaking her own rule and coming to stand close before him, close enough that she could have touched him if she wanted. “Stay there.”

A swallow worked its way down his throat in fits and starts. 

Marta took the stairs two at a time, not caring if she made any noise. Her book still laid where she’d dropped it when the knock came, open on its face, a few pages wrinkled with the force of its spine; Marta righted it on her way across the room, marking her place with care and setting it aside on the desk. 

And then she switched the music off. The house ached with silence. 

He was right where she had left him when she came back, sitting on that bench with his big hands clasped in his lap, his legs stretched out wide. His eyes were on hers the moment she rounded the corner, but he didn’t speak, and he didn’t move. 

God. God, this was—Marta took a deep breath, and hoped that it wasn’t a terrible idea to leave the gun upstairs. 

“Come with me,” she said. 

Ransom followed along behind her silently as she led him down the dark hallway, looming less than she would have expected, slower than he ever used to move. He was quiet; Marta could hear the muffled sound of their feet on the carpet, velvet-low and soft, and the push and pull of his breath. 

He slowed to a halt in front of the wheel of knives, feet stuttering, jaw flexing. 

Marta turned on a few lights, and took her place in the window seat. She would let him stand. 

“Ransom,” she said, and that caught his attention. He turned to face her immediately. 

She hadn’t had a chance to really look at him yet, so she took the opportunity to do so now. 

Different. He did look different. There were the obvious things: the way he’d thinned out, and the buzzed cut of his hair, the visible injuries, the cheap quality of the clothes he was wearing. There were smaller things too, though: quieter eyes. A mouth that didn’t look ready to bloom barbed words. The way this last year had seemed to add five to everything about him. 

“You can’t be here,” she said. She crossed her arms over her chest, gripped her elbows. “You know that.”

She expected an insult, a joke. Instead he just kept looking at her. “Tell me to leave,” he said, “and I will.”

 _Oh my god,_ Marta thought, and then couldn’t think anything else. He would, she thought. He would leave if she told him to. 

She couldn’t tell him to. 

“I have a restraining order against you,” Marta said in a low voice, “and you are already violating it by calling me. You’re on _parole,_ Ransom. You aren’t even supposed to be in this state, are you?”

He grinned. He knew she wasn’t going to send him away, and her blood boiled, and he was a _bastard,_ and— 

“Nope,” he said. He popped the P. Like an asshole. “Supposed to be in New York with Mommie Dearest. Special permission, and all that. Like hell was I gonna go there, though.”

“New York,” Marta repeated flatly. 

“You got it,” he said. 

“And what do you think,” said Marta, voice unsatisfactorily shrill, “is going to happen when they catch you? Here, with me, in the state you are not supposed to be in, after you’re already in hot water from fighting your uncle when he visited you _in prison?”_

Ransom was calm. Infuriatingly so. Relatively good-natured even, and wasn’t that mystifying? “Dunno,” he said. He shrugged. “Guess I’ll just have to not get caught.”

“Ransom,” Marta huffed. 

“Marta,” Ransom smiled. 

“I think I should be more afraid of you than I am,” she said, sinking back against the window. 

It was abrupt. She knew that. But there it was. 

The glass was very cold through her sweater. 

“I thought you would be,” Ransom said. It was too quiet. She thought that maybe this meant something to him. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he added, after a moment of the two of them simply looking at each other, eyes meeting across all of that empty space. “And I meant what I said: you tell me to go, and I’m out of here.”

 _I think I’m going to try to apologize to you._ Maybe this was his way of doing that. 

She shouldn’t trust him. 

And she didn’t—not exactly. She didn’t trust him as a person: he wasn’t good. He wasn’t kind, he wasn’t nice. He was a killer—a failed one, but the intentions were still there. 

She trusted that he wouldn’t hurt her, though. That truth scared her more than he did. 

“You can stay the night,” she said. She couldn’t believe herself. She wondered what he’d do if she grabbed one of those prop knives, if she pushed him to the ground, if she folded it up neat and small just to the right of his heart. “Tomorrow morning you’re gone.”

Ransom’s eyes stayed fixed on her as she stood and crossed the room. “God,” he said as she brushed by him, “you are so—”

Marta whirled on him, furious and confused and not nauseous at all, not even a little bit. “So _what_? Stupid? Gullible?” 

He was very close. She hadn’t realized that at first; he was very close to her, with his quiet-smiling lips and his tricky blue eyes. 

“Kind,” he said. He hadn’t stopped smiling at her. “It _is_ stupid.”

Marta turned around and led him from the room, clasping her hands so she didn’t add a matching bruise to the other side of his jaw. 

  
  
  


Ransom didn’t have pajamas. She wouldn’t have let him wear them anyway. There was something about seeing him less than fully clothed that Marta wasn’t ready to face yet. 

She passed him a blanket and a pillow, and he stretched out on the floor beside her bed, everything still on but his shoes. 

“How did you get here?” 

He was on his side, knees pulled up to his chest, head resting on one folded arm. It was a strangely childlike position; that, coupled with the slow-blinking heaviness of his gaze, mixed itself with the fact that Ransom was horrible and made Marta breathless with the confusion of it all. He was so many things. So many things that she didn’t understand. 

“Uber,” he said. “A few of ‘em.”

Still with that soft-edged smile. He _was_ like a child: he didn’t understand this situation at all. Breezing through life heedless of consequences, acting out in petulance when he didn’t get his way. Smiling up at her from the floor, promising that he wouldn’t hurt her, offering tentative half-apologies to her and only her for killing his own grandfather. For almost killing Fran. For wanting to kill her. 

“You didn’t drive?” she asked, surprised. Ransom loved to drive, she knew he did; had seen it when she’d sought shelter in his car, and when he’d strained upward in his seat beside her during that car chase, like he wanted to be the one with his foot on the pedal. 

That smile turned wicked. “Marta,” Ransom said, and maybe it was because he had only said her name a handful of times in their lives together that she remembered each and every one. “You own that car now.”

“Oh,” said Marta. She was sitting up, legs hanging over the side of the mattress. She wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight. Not with him there. Not with him here. “I guess.”

“You’re rich,” said Ransom. A stupid thing to say. It wasn’t like she didn’t know. “Maybe you can pay my way back, Miss Rockefeller.”

Marta rolled her eyes. “You can’t take an Uber back.”

“And why’s that?”

“You should be at Linda’s by now,” she said. “She’ll have reported it when you didn’t show up. People will be looking for you. I’ll… I’ll have to drive you.”

Ransom’s eyes were very steady against hers. “She wouldn’t,” he said. There wasn’t any kind of bitterness in his voice, no anger: the detachedness of it was telling on its own. He was upset, whether he wanted to be or not. “My mother hates my guts for doing what I did. Hated them before that. She won’t want any more attention called to us than there already is.”

It would be so easy to give up, and let him go on his own. It would be so wonderful not to care if he was caught and punished. 

Marta clasped her hands together in her lap. They were shaking again, just a bit. 

She thought maybe the two of them were closer than she knew. Could you be close with someone who killed your friend? Someone who wanted to kill you?

Maybe. If they called you from prison, even though they weren’t supposed to. If they were trying to apologize. 

“Still,” she said quietly. “It isn’t worth the risk.”

That line of stitches looked like it hurt. Those bruises—dead-dull and the spilled-wine color of old blood in the center, fading to purple and then sick green on the edges—those bruises looked like they hurt, too. He needed to shave. The haircut didn’t suit him. 

He was still almost beautiful. 

“Alright,” he murmured.

He didn’t ask her if it was a problem, if it was too much trouble for her to drop everything and take a road trip to New York. He didn’t ask after her mother and sister, make sure they’d be fine. He was an asshole. He was an inconsiderate prick. 

“Turn off the light,” Marta said, and he did. 

  
  
  


Marta didn’t sleep. 

Ransom’s breath sounded the way it did over the phone, when he wasn’t losing his mind over something. Even and slow. Easy. 

Devastatingly familiar. 

She wished that was what this was. Just Ransom—just Ransom—just a phone call; two people, separated by miles and miles and some telephone wire. Nothing but their voices meeting in the middle. 

If Marta wanted, she could pick up the gun sitting on her nightstand and shoot him while she slept. 

Marta wanted plenty of things. But she didn’t want that. 

She rolled onto her side, turned her head on her pillow so that she could see him easily if only she would open her eyes. She wouldn’t open her eyes. She couldn’t open her eyes. 

She continued to try to be shocked that he had shown up here, but she couldn’t manage that any longer, either. The shock had died right around the time he had smiled at her, really smiled at her, downstairs in the foyer. Who else would he come to? 

He was terrible, and she didn’t want him getting caught for this. She was terrible, and she cared about him. 

_Tell me to leave and I will._

It was possible that he cared about her, too. In his own twisted, strange, awful way. He hadn’t killed her, and he could have—with his bare hands probably, wrapped naked around her throat. He had offered to kill Walt for her, and she thought he probably meant it. 

Marta abruptly wondered what Blanc would think of all of this. _Fascinating,_ he might say, before calling the police with a smile in his voice and a hand on Ransom’s arm. He was coming tomorrow with a briefcase full of fingers that happened to be the only clues to a murder that had taken place yesterday in Toledo, asking for her opinion; wildly Marta considered what it would be like to tell him, tell him that Ransom spent the night on her bedroom floor— 

Shit. _Shit._

He was coming tomorrow. Blanc was _coming here tomorrow._

“Wake up,” Marta said, trembling but sharp, and turned the lamp on. Ransom groaned from the floor, scrubbing two big hands over his face as he squinted up at the light; Marta ignored his protests and stood, stepping over him to get to her dresser. “We have to leave now, quick, before dawn.”

Maybe he heard the panic in her voice and was concerned, or maybe he just liked drama. Either was possible, with a guy like him. With Ransom Drysdale. 

He sat up. The blanket pooled around his waist in silky wrinkles and folds. “Marta? You ok?” he asked. He had been asleep; his voice was foggy and soft, and for a second Marta was disoriented, was transported to a conversation across a diner table, where he had seemed so kind. 

Marta didn’t answer, digging through dresser drawers to find something she could throw on. Blanc was coming early, catching a red-eye flight, so they only had a couple of hours— 

“What the fuck is going on?” Ransom said sharply. 

He was not kind. But she appreciated that he never tried to be friendly to make up for it.

“Blanc is coming tomorrow,” she said. “Early, as soon as he can. He’ll turn you in.”

Ransom was standing across the room, bare feet tangled in the blanket he’d been under. A muscle ticked in his jaw, bunchy and sharp. “Son of a bitch,” he said. 

Marta was inclined to agree. “Go downstairs,” Marta said, “and get my purse and keys. Sit on the bench and don’t move until I get there.”

Ransom nodded. He stayed a respectful distance away from her as he slipped on his shoes and left the room, but he didn’t bother to lower his voice as he swore. “ _Fucking_ hick, always ruining my _fucking life._ Goddamn useless, idiotic asshole.” He thundered down the stairs, voice fading as he went. “Doesn’t he know I haven’t slept in forty-eight hours? Disrespectful twat...”

Marta rolled her eyes again. A child. That’s what he was. 

She had a small bag packed and the dogs locked in their kennels and was downstairs as fast as possible. It was three in the morning, and still pitch black outside; Marta hadn’t slept at all, either, so Ransom could shut his mouth. 

He was sitting on the bench where she told him to be, hands folded over her purse, keys hooked over one finger. She smiled at him. “Good job,” she said. 

He shifted on the bench. Faintly, he smiled back. 

“Let’s go,” she said, taking the purse and the keys out of his hands carefully, so that she didn’t touch him at all. She wasn’t ready for that. Maybe never would be. 

She would tell Blanc that she had forgotten about their appointment, because that much was true. He would know there was something more, of course, but even if he asked questions, she wouldn’t be able to answer them. He might guess; without proof, though, he wouldn’t pry. 

Marta was counting on it. 

“You know,” said Ransom, feet crunching on the gravel as they walked to her car. She glanced up at him; he had his hands in the pockets of those jeans that she never thought he’d be caught dead in, head tipped back to look up at the night sky. “It’s worryingly easy to steal from you.”

Marta frowned. Ransom was apparently a fan of the non sequitur. 

There was something about the way he said it: her heart began to beat faster than normal, steadily picking up speed the longer Ransom didn’t look at her, the wider his smirk stretched. She stepped away from him. “What do you mean?” she asked. 

Nothing. 

Heart pounding now. “Ransom. What do you mean?”

He pulled the knife out of his pocket, and stabbed it into the palm of his opposite hand. 

Marta didn’t scream, or yell, or cry. 

Her heart stopped beating. 

Ransom was smiling. He looked up at her, and lifted the knife, and there wasn’t any blood, and the blade sprang back, and it was fake, of course it was, it was the fake knife from that goddamn wheel, it was fake, he was fine, it was fake and he—he—

“ _Fuck you_ ,” she whispered, so angry she couldn’t lift her voice. She was shaking all over, head to toe; shaking as she stared at him, glared at him, and the knife that flashed in his hand even though it was plastic. “Fuck. You.”

Ransom’s smile fell slowly, bit by bit. His eyebrows crashed together above his bruised nose. “It’s fake,” he said. “Marta. The fake one. Jesus—it’s a joke, that’s all.”

Awful. He was awful. He was. _Fuck._

“Marta,” he said again. Strangely dejected; those wide shoulders fell a bit, and a frown pulled at his lips. She wanted to hit him. Slap him right across those sharp cheeks, make him hurt a little. “Come on.”

It was January, and the wind that blew around this hill that Marta lived on was frigid as death, stroking down the back of her neck and the exposed places that her coat didn’t quite cover with chilling fingers. Even so, she was on fire. 

“You,” she said, and her voice was shaking too, “you do _not_ get to do that to me. You do not get to make fun of me, and you do not get to treat me like this is all a delightful game, because it isn’t, Ransom. You killed Harlan. You did. You would have killed Fran. I know that you wanted to kill me.”

He flinched. She didn’t care. 

Marta kicked gravel up as she stalked forward. She was inches from him, and he didn’t back away. “I am in control. _I_ am in charge of you. You will apologize to me,” she murmured. She could feel his breath on her face. Warmth, dusted across her forehead. “And you will mean it.”

“I’m sorry,” Ransom murmured back, and sank to his knees. 

She stared at him blankly for a moment, so furious that she almost couldn’t comprehend what had just happened. 

He was ridiculous. He was— 

He was a work of art. He was a man who had failed to kill anyone three times over. He was kneeling here at her feet, his shorn head bowed, knife extended in one flat palm like a knight in a storybook. A knight who had plans to poison her later; to slip something in her drink when her back was turned. 

It was the eyes that did it. Blue, slyly green about the pupils. Peering at Marta above a rarely-solemn line of lips. 

“You’re in control,” he said. His voice was deep from down there. She could kick him now, if she wanted, and the thought came to Marta suddenly that he would let her. “You tell me what to do.”

Marta was quiet. It thrilled her, just a little, when he said that. Like car chases across civilized town. Like a collapsible prop knife inches away from her heart, held in an unsteady hand. 

“I tell you what to do,” she repeated, and did not mean for her voice to sound the way it did. Low. Like she was pleased. 

This bastard. She wanted to touch that quirked edge of his pink mouth, force it into a shape she liked. Again, she thought it: _he’d let me._ He’d let her do anything. 

Ransom’s pretty eyes lowered themselves, lashes folding down like the cover of a book. The knife in his hands shook, a movement radiating from his shoulders. He was thinner than he used to be, he was different, he... Still, the tremble called back that day so many months ago with force, and Marta didn’t know how to feel. 

She never did, with him. With Ransom. An asshole, a failure. An unloved son, a privileged trust fund kid. The man who had wanted to kill her, the man who knelt before her so submissively now.

Bastard and artwork and liar and knight. 

“Yes,” he said, lower than before, scraping out of a place in his chest that she knew he didn’t want her to hear. “Marta.”

Power. A strange and unfamiliar thing, especially when so freely given. 

“Stand,” Marta said. “And give that to me.”

Ransom stood. 

He could have been lying, of course. Saying pretty things just to get what he wanted from her. 

The lazy-shameful flush that spread over his angular face, low and slow and mortified, told Marta that she needn’t think so. 

He meant it. Crazy as that seemed. She was in charge of him. 

Their hands brushed when Ransom passed her the knife, and Marta was surprised at the force of her reaction. He was large and close and dully acquiescent; she was alone with him—entirely alone—for the first time since... everything. 

Yet this still wasn’t fear skittering along the base of her belly, and she knew it never would be. 

Marta thought of handing over a toxicology report, of dialing 911. Self-preservation had never been her strong suit. 

“Get in the car, Ransom,” said Marta. 

He looked at her. He was hands and ears and eyelashes, buzzed haircut, dirty clothes on a thin frame, that bruise along his jaw. He was tall and broad and still built, and those lips were a _shape,_ and there was something—something—about his eyes. 

Marta wanted to ask him if he was ok. She didn’t, though. She knew the answer. 

“Aye aye, captain,” he said. It was a joke, but he didn’t deliver it like one, and he was unsteady on his feet as he climbed back into her car. 

The prop knife felt kitschy and almost weightless across her palms, and Marta contemplated just hurling it into the long grass here at the side of the driveway, losing it in the bruise-black night. 

Instead, she didn’t. Instead, she slipped it into the baggy pocket of her cardigan, knowing that Ransom’s eyes were upon her the whole time. 

  
  
  


He was silent beside her. She didn’t invite him to speak up. 

Marta thought about the last time they had done this. That futile chase. That ridiculous arrest. 

Ransom in the seat next to her, lying through his teeth. 

She looked at him. He was leaning his temple against the window, his hands atop his knees. His chest rose and fell evenly beneath the dark blue flannel he had on, beneath the puffy layers of his nylon coat. 

The anger had passed. Or not passed, not exactly: morphed into something else. Something large and sharp and lodged just behind her breastbone, something that made her heart beat fast when she looked at him. 

It was a thoughtless thing for him to do. 

It was the kind of thing Harlan would have done. A fake knife, a running gag. She wouldn’t have cared as much if Harlan had done it. Possibly because he’d never had plans to murder anyone, more than likely because Harlan didn’t do _this_ to her—light her on fire from the inside out, confuse her, make her want to scream. 

She had never wanted to see Harlan on his knees. 

Ransom must have sensed her gaze on him. He slid his eyes over to her, peering at her through shadowy dawn light. 

“Did you read all of Harlan’s books?” she asked him. Mild: a peace offering. 

She had surprised him. His eyelids flickered, just a bit. He paused. 

“Yeah,” he said at last. “Or. Well. All of them he’d written before I turned eighteen or so. After that I stopped.” 

Marta nodded, and forced her eyes back onto the road. They had been close, Ransom and Harlan—or so Harlan had always said. Closer than Ransom was to his parents, or anyone else in his family for that matter. The only Thrombey Ransom seemed to care about. 

Maybe that was why it had been so easy for Ransom to kill him. The only person in his family he felt any emotion toward—maybe it was hard to tell what was love and what was hate, after so long without a point of reference. 

Marta sort of understood that, a bit. 

“I never had the chance to read many of them,” she said. “Always too tired after work. Just went straight to sleep.” She took the exit up ahead, merging onto the interstate, and picked up a bit of speed. “I’m reading them now.”

“Oh yeah?” Ransom had a smile in his voice. She didn’t know why, but she wasn’t going to complain about it. “Any good?” 

“Remarkable. I can see how somebody who read so many could come up with a plan like you did.”

That was a mean. She knew it was. She looked at Ransom. 

He laughed. Harsher than usual, but still: he laughed. 

“Marta Cabrera,” he said, something like wonder in his voice, and then he didn’t say anything at all. 

  
  
  


Marta drove, and drove, and drove. They crossed state lines. The sun came up. 

Blanc called her. 

Hands shaking: she picked the phone up anyway and put it on speaker. Ransom’s eyes were on her face. 

“Salutations, Miss Cabrera,” Blanc said pleasantly. “I am standing on your front porch, and you don’t appear to be here.”

“I’m so sorry, Detective Blanc,” Marta said. She was. She hated telling someone she would do something, and then not following through. “I forgot you were coming over this morning.”

“Indeed?” Blanc mused. “There isn’t any chance you’re asleep in there somewhere?”

Marta smiled. “I’m afraid not.”

“Well,” said Blanc, sounding a bit lost, but willing to play along. “That’s alright then. Tell me this—should I be worried about you?”

“No,” said Marta, and she could tell that Ransom was more surprised than she was at her answer; he straightened a bit in the seat beside her, and his gaze on her face turned warm. She could feel it. “I’m alright. I just… I have to please ask you if you won’t ask me any more questions about this. You know I can’t lie, and in this case, I cannot tell you the truth.”

Blanc was quiet. Static hummed gently between them: interstate sounds on her side, the rustle of the woods around the house on his. 

“I trust you to always do what’s right,” Blanc said finally. “I do not, however, trust you to always do what is _safe.”_

Marta swallowed tightly, hands shifting on the steering wheel. She wanted to look at Ransom. She wanted to look at Ransom so badly. 

“I believe that the former is more important,” she said. “You know that.”

“Yes,” Blanc said. He might be laughing. Not at her, she didn’t think. “Well.”

“Well.”

“Well. How many days should I expect you to be gone before I send a search party?”

Her turn to laugh, and it was a relief; tension bled from her slowly, like air streaming out of a punctured balloon. “How about I just keep you updated? That way you don’t have to keep track.

“Marvelous,” said Blanc. “I will miss your input on this case, but I suppose I will have to manage on my own.”

“Your track record indicates that you’ll do fine,” said Marta dryly. 

They said goodbye after a few minutes of idle chatter. “Do be careful,” said Blanc. Marta thought of Mama and Alicia both asking the same thing of her; Marta didn’t answer. “Ah,” said Blanc mildly. “I see.”

Ransom huffed out a breath. It might have been a laugh, but Marta wasn’t looking at him, so she didn’t know. 

“Goodbye,” said Marta, hand hovering over the button on her phone. “Give the evidence my love.”

“Farewell, fellow truth-seeker,” said Blanc, because why speak clearly when the option to sound like a character from a Harlan Thrombey novel was right there? 

Marta hung up. 

“Huh,” said Ransom, and then fell silent. 

She darted a glare in his direction. “What?” she asked, snapping a bit more than she’d intended. It was never straightforward with him. She always felt hot or cold, mad or dangerously, stupidly pleased. 

“Doe he call you often?” 

The sky had never really brightened up. At least it wasn’t raining any longer. 

“No more than you do,” she said. 

This pleased him. She could tell. He relaxed a little, settling back into his seat. 

“So you two aren’t…” 

Marta looked at him, an insult sharp and waiting upon her tongue, but he— 

Pink limned the tops of his cheekbones brashly angry spots of vivid feeling that he clearly did not want to be there. 

Marta found herself delighted. 

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” she said, just to fuck with him, just because she could. Games. Games and mysteries, and clues right before her eyes. “But no. Of course not. Blanc brings me cases. Apparently I have an affinity for crime solving.”

Blanc was also married, though she refrained from telling Ransom that. Marta had met his husband last summer. He trained police dogs. He was nice. 

“Oh,” said Ransom, She kept watching him, and the color glowed a little brighter, and he was obviously furious about it, and Marta was _delighted._ “Ok.”

She smiled sweetly at him. Let her eyes drift back to the road without lingering on his. 

“You probably should have told him about me,” Ransom said after a while. He was back to leaning against the window, but his head was turned so he could look at her. “You _know_ that’s what I deserve,” he added, his voice unbearably warm. 

Every time she thought she had a leg up on him he spoke to her like that, or he looked at her like that, and it all came crashing down again. 

“I know,” Marta said. She didn’t quite wish she could lie. 

“You aren’t big on giving people what they deserve, are you? I mean. In the revenge sense.” It was phrased like he’d just thought of it, but Marta could tell that this was something Ransom had been considering for a while now. 

He paid attention to her. Maybe because there was nothing else for him to pay attention to. 

“What do you mean?”

He took his time. Drummed his long fingers on the plastic armrest of the door while he thought. 

“Ok,” he said, more to himself than her. “Take Meg, for example: she exposed your mother to the whole evil lot of ‘em, and you still pay her every month. And Jacob—I know you offered to pay for Jacob’s stupid racist fascism school; Walt was furious about that too, by the way, said you were patronising him. And you let all of them have whatever they wanted from the house, too.”

“Not whatever they wanted,” Marta corrected, feeling like he’d just peeled back the first protective layer of her skin and had a look inside. “I kept all the books.”

Ransom gave her a fondly amused smile—and wasn’t that a sight. “Marta,” he sighed. 

Marta shifted in her seat. She didn’t want to justify this to him. She could tell him to be quiet, she supposed, but that seemed excessive. 

“I’m just trying to do what Harlan would have wanted,” she said finally. It was all she’d been doing since she thought she switched those vials. “It doesn’t hurt me to take care of them from a distance.”

Ransom had very expressive eyes. It was something she’d noticed years and years ago during one of those awful parties, watching him lean against the wall from her perch across the room as Walt yelled obscenities at him. His eyes were flinging insults even when his mouth was closed. 

They were softened now. Listening. He was listening to her. 

He had always done that. Even when he wanted to hurt her, he’d listened. 

“So you think Harlan would want you to be my getaway driver? While I avoid the prison I’m incarcerated in because I killed him?”

He was trying to joke about it. He was failing. Marta could tell that he cared very much what she answered. 

One of Ransom’s hands was resting flat open on his knee. She brushed the back of it with the tips of her fingers—soft skin, bruised knuckles, that tender curve of finger and wrist—and her heart jerked in her chest, and she retreated fast. 

“Yes,” she said. _Playing life like a game._ “I do.”

  
  
  


They ate gas station food for lunch, because it was fast and cheap and Marta wanted to see Ransom Drysdale eat a Little Debbie. 

His eyebrows flew to his hairline when he bit down. Marta smiled. 

They were only a couple of hours from Linda’s house, which Marta had the address of memorized due to the fact that she had received more strongly worded letters from there than anywhere else. “Do you think you should call her?” Marta asked. “You could use my phone; she’d definitely answer me if she thought it had to do with money.”

Ransom shrugged. The closer they had gotten to their destination, the more sullen he had become. Petulant, moody child. 

Marta sighed at him. 

He looked over at the sound. There was a frown caught between his eyebrows, at the corners of his mouth; he wanted to please her, Marta thought. He didn’t want her to be unhappy with him. 

It would be so easy just to crush him. 

“The element of surprise might be best,” he said grudgingly. “Just showing up. Not giving her a chance to say no.”

It was awful, how much she wanted to feel sorry for him. He was manipulating her, because of course he was: he was Ransom Drysdale. That’s what he _did._

And yet nobody should have a mother who hated them. And yet here Marta was. 

Here she was. The only person who would let him call, the only person who would talk to him. The only person who could tell him what to do.

“Walt will have told her what I did,” he added after her silence stretched too long. “And she’ll be angry about that. Not because she likes Walt—she hates Walt—but because I’m supposed to get locked up for a while and then come out shiny and fixed and brand new. Not causing even more trouble.”

“She would really turn you away?” 

She didn’t say it— _not even I turned you away, and you wanted to kill me_ —but it was implied. 

“Marta.” He laughed. It sounded a bit painful. “Just because you’re the best person in the world doesn’t mean that everyone else is. You know that—Christ. You know me.”

“I’m not,” she said, flushed. “The best person in the world, I mean. Don’t say that.”

“Fine,” he said, raising his hands in half-hearted surrender, in an under-developed mockery of last night. “I won’t say it. I can think it, though, there’s no rule against that.”

“I could make one,” Marta said. She thought about touching him again, and took too long to decide whether or not she wanted to. 

“Yeah,” he breathed. “Yeah, I’m sure you could.”

“And you’d listen to me.”

That feeling in her stomach again. Hot and quivering. _Yes,_ she thought. _Yes, I’d like to touch you._

Almost beautiful. That was Ransom. 

He didn’t speak, but he didn’t need to. 

  
  
  


Evening, and Marta stopped for gas again, in a town that was made of empty buildings and chipped curbsides. 

Ransom followed her inside to pay, and Marta didn’t stop him. He was big and warm and a little bit behind her. He was docile, and stood where she wanted him to stand. 

He had nice hands. 

They were both hungry and tired and distinctly sick of being in a car, so Marta made an executive decision. 

“Get in,” she said as they left the station. Spare change jingled in her pocket. “We’re going to dinner.”

“Ok,” said Ransom, and ducked his head as he climbed inside. 

  
  
  


“Hey there Bezos,” Ransom said as he shouldered his way into the diner she’d found with her phone, smirking down at her as she held the door. “You’re going to have to cover this one, I’m afraid.” 

Marta leveled a look at him as she brushed past, close enough that the edge of her coat sleeve skimmed his chest. 

She heard him breathe in. Sharp. 

“We’ll see about that, Ransom,” she said. Even though she knew she would. It was just so fun to tease him, and stunningly easy. She longed to see that color bloom again. 

They sat at a table near the back, sliding onto cracked vinyl seats beneath a hanging light that made the pale green parts of Ransom’s fading bruises go sickly yellow. Ransom rested his hand on the sticky tabletop: Marta smiled at the way his brow wrinkled in alarm. “Marta—” he began. 

“That’s normal,” she said. She opened her menu. It was sticky too. “Trust me. I’m a connoisseur of places like these.”

Mama had worked in one for a while, when Alicia and Marta were very little. Marta had spent more afternoons after school in the noisy kitchen of that diner than she could count. 

“If you say so,” he murmured, making no move to open his own menu. 

Marta ended up ordering for both of them, Ransom sitting across from her with attentive eyes and folded hands. 

This was so different from the last time they had dined together. Power dynamics entirely shifted on their heads—Marta was in charge now, Marta told him what to do—no lies taking the situation and twisting it into an altered state. Ransom was Ransom: a plotter, a killer, not a kind man. He wasn’t helping her. He wasn’t helping anyone, not even himself. He wanted her to be pleased with him. He wasn’t going to hurt her. He wanted to do what she wanted him to do. 

Marta ordered for him, not the other way around. 

Blue eyes meeting hers. A snap of energy between them, a thrum of tension. Their knees were very close beneath the table. 

“This would be a fairly easy way for you to poison me,” said Ransom, offhand. 

That was in poor taste. Marta shouldn’t laugh. 

Marta laughed. 

“Yes,” she said. 

Ransom smiled. “I suppose I’d deserve it.”

“Yes.” 

“But you’re too good.”

“I’m too _smart._ ”

He had once more leaned forward by now, apparently forgetting all about the sticky table. He rested his forearms on the edge, hands clasped loosely in front of him. One eyebrow arched high. “You just managed to compliment yourself and insult me in three words; maybe you _are_ a Thrombey.” 

Marta decided that that didn’t deserve an answer. 

They ate, and Marta was as aware of Ransom’s eyes on her as she was aware of the prop knife in her pocket. A year ago, he had tackled her to the ground, pushed that knife into her chest. A year ago, he had wanted her dead. 

So much could change in a year. Marta was, as insane as this was, glad that Ransom had decided to call her those few months ago. 

“I probably should have asked,” Ransom began, serious, although he didn’t sound repentant at all, “are your mother and sister alright? I know your sister’s at school and your mom has her business, but I didn’t see either of them at your house…”

 _At your house._ He was the only one of that family who ever referred to it like that. 

“They’re fine,” said Marta, distantly amused, because Ransom wasn’t the type of person you could be angry at for forgetting something like this. There were so many other things to be angry at him for. “Mama is visiting Alicia at school for a couple of days.” She took a sip of coffee. It was sort of cold and not very good, but she was exhausted and she was going to drink it anyway. “They won’t know you were ever there.”

Ransom was eating his burger and fries like it was his last meal on earth. Careless and fast and hungry. Human of him. “Unless you tell them,” he said. 

“I won’t tell them unless they ask me,” Marta said. She was eating fast too, and she was vaguely trembly all over: a product of too long without sleep, maybe, or this second cup of coffee she was having, or the fact that Ransom Drysdale was sitting across from her, recklessly handsome, claiming this dingy booth like it was his palace, and looking at her with startling affection in his eyes. “And why would they ever ask me?”

“Hm,” said Ransom. A non-answer. He had his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and the length of his forearms—thicker than Marta’s biceps, pale from the New England January and a year with no sun, covered in neat, darkish hair—was confoundingly distracting. “Do they know I call?”

Marta knew Ransom knew they did. Mama had answered the phone once before Marta could get to it and decide if she wanted to pick it up or let it ring, and she had locked herself in the kitchen with it. Marta still didn’t know what the two of them had said to each other. 

Marta had been more careful after that. 

“You know I can’t lie,” Marta huffed. “Besides. Why would I lie about that, even if I could?”

Ransom smiled faintly. A test, then. “Just wondering if you were aware.”

“My mother is a loud woman.”

“She loves you very much.”

Marta smiled softly into the bottom of her chipped mug. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. She does.”

“She threatened to—oh, what were her words—cleave my gonads from my body if I ever hurt you again,” Ransom said dryly. “That’s when I got a clue.”

Marta laughed, imagining it. Her mother was small, but she would; no questions asked. 

“Whereas,” Ransom continued, sipping his own coffee, “I believe my own mother might cleave my gonads off at the end of this trip whether I hurt you or not. I won’t, of course, not even if she promises to let me keep them. I’m great like that.”

His hands were right there. Just sitting right there, both of them, palms pale and bare, fingers blunt and thick and long. 

He wanted her to touch him, she knew he did—but he didn’t expect it of her. 

Maybe that was why she did it. Maybe that was why Marta sat down her mug and leaned over her own side of the table, and took one of his hands in both of hers. 

Ransom stiffened, froze; and then his shoulders dropped. His eyelids lowered a fraction, a brief flicker. 

He sank towards her, just a bit. 

“Thank you,” said Marta. “That’s good of you.”

“Yeah,” said Ransom quietly. His voice was barely more than air, a scrape of sound. His fingers flexed between hers but he didn’t tighten his grip, like he was scared he’d press too deep. The thought made her chest ache. “Well, you know me. Good to the core.”

The thought hit Marta abruptly: she _did_ know him, as much as anybody could. Maybe better. And he knew her. 

It was possible that they were friends. And god, wasn’t that complicated—so many strange and violent threads between them, tangling them up and pulling them closer together at the same time. 

  
  
  


He followed Marta to the counter. The space between them had evaporated as the day wore on: they weren’t touching, but Marta wasn’t enforcing a distance any wider than a few inches. 

Her hands still remembered the shape of his. 

“Bathroom,” Ransom said, jerking his head toward a hallway by the front door in explanation as he moved away from her. “Be right back.”

A nod. “Meet me in the car.”

Marta paid quickly, not really registering much around her as she handed over her card and waited for it to be swiped. She hadn’t had a moment alone since Ransom showed up at her door last night, and there were so many things about the past twenty-four hours she needed to process that she didn’t know where to start. 

She collected her card and went to wait in the car. 

Ransom had come to her as soon as he was released on parole. Not with intentions of murdering her, as one might expect: simply because… what? He wanted to? 

That’s what it was looking like. 

Even so, he’d said that he would leave if Marta told him to, and she believed him. And that was the strange part: Ransom’s easy willingness to do whatever Marta wanted him to do. His eagerness for it. 

He probably hadn’t been told what to do very many times in his spoiled life, and when he was, it hadn’t been by anyone he liked. Marta, against all odds, had to admit that it sort of seemed that he liked her. 

Well. That was fine. It wasn’t like she didn’t get a sort of sadistic joy out of it. 

Marta wondered if Ransom would continue to call her once he was at Linda’s, or if he’d hold back—restraining order, and all. 

She hoped he didn’t hold back. 

It might be… nice. To know how he was doing. To know if he’d finally snapped and murdered Walt. To know if he was ever actually going to apologize— 

Something thumped down onto the hood of Marta’s car. 

She looked up. 

They were up and off again in half a second, but the man Ransom had just pinned down had left a back-of-the-head-sized dent in the center of the hood. Marta threw open her door. 

Ransom and the man from inside wheeled across the dusk-dark parking lot, fists flying, bared teeth flashing bright in the buzzing streetlight above. The man was thin, wiry: Ransom was the kind of big that came from being rich enough to afford a personal trainer and three kinds of protein powder. 

There was a clear winner here. 

Ransom had one hand wound tight in the collar of the man’s stained uniform polo, and Marta winced as she watched the other collide with the man’s face, something cracking loudly enough to echo through the empty night. 

Ransom fought without any self preservation. 

Ransom fought like his only goal was blood. 

Marta didn’t realize she was talking until she had her hands in the back of Ransom’s shirt, until he was falling still at her words, dropping his fists, looking at her with an eye that was already swelling up, with doubled down bruises. 

The other man got one last good hit in. Fierce, knuckles ground into Ransom’s jaw. Ransom stumbled back a few steps, shoulders crashing into Marta. 

For a moment, the only sound was ragged breath. 

“Stop,” said Marta, and that’s what she’d been saying, wasn’t it? She pulled Ransom back a few more steps, and his skin was warm through his shirt, and his mouth was bleeding, and she let go of him. 

The other man was staring at her. He had the palm of his hand pressed up against his nose, and blood seeped out from beneath his fingers. “You need to teach your dog to heel.” he spat. Nasal and sharp. His eyes were wet from pain. He had Ransom’s blood on his shirt. 

“You need to get the fuck out of my sight—”

“Ransom,” Marta said, sharp. He fell back, glancing at her. He was mad. Almost as angry as she had ever seen him. It didn’t scare Marta this time; it wasn’t directed at her. 

The man scoffed, looking between them. He was still panting a little. 

“I’m so sorry,” Marta said, ignoring the previous comment. She didn’t say that she was sure it was all just a misunderstanding: Marta didn’t know what had happened to inspire this, but she was positive that Ransom knew what he was doing. He was practically vibrating beside her, the urge to tackle the man to the ground evident in every jagged line of him. “I’m a nurse, I have a First Aid kit in my car. Let me help you?” 

The man shook his head. He was glaring at them, but he was backing up toward the diner, too. “Just get the hell out of here,” he said. “I don’t want any fucking trouble.”

“No,” Marta said. She had grabbed Ransom again—she didn’t remember when—and she was holding onto his arm like he might try to dart away from her at any minute. Calling the police would be the very last thing she would do in this situation. Not with Ransom breaking the law just by standing here and not in Linda’s home. “No, of course not. Sorry again.”

He stumbled inside. The bell above the door tinkled. Marta watched him make his way to the sink behind the counter, watched him get a couple of paper towels wet and press them to his face, and was grateful that they were in the sort of town that wouldn’t look twice at two men tearing into each other in a parking lot. 

Beside her, Ransom was stiff. 

“Car,” said Marta. She couldn’t decide if she was angry or scared or horrified; her voice sounded like she was all three. Ransom flinched a little. “Now.”

He moved rigidly, like he hurt: Marta thought viciously _good,_ and then swallowed the bile that rose in her throat. 

Ransom groaned a little as he lowered himself into his seat, and bit the noise off fast, glancing at her. 

Marta fished a disposable ice pack out of her console, cracked it to bring up the chill, and handed it wordlessly to him. She could feel him looking at her: unwavering and hot. After a moment, he pressed it gingerly to his eye, and wiped a bit of blood onto his sleeve. 

Another executive decision: Marta pulled up the nearest motel that didn’t sound like it would turn them away, and set her GPS. She didn’t take the turn out of the lot and onto the road carefully. Possibly out of spite. 

  
  


The room was small and dirty in the creases, two tiny beds with a nightstand shoved between. Ransom sat down on the end of one. 

They looked at each other. He had let the ice pack fall to his lap, and his legs were stretched out across the stained carpet; there was a slump to his shoulders that didn’t fit on him, and he was smiling at her through the blood and the dingy light and the slight rasp in his lungs. 

Marta had brought her First Aid kit in from the car. The noise it made when she unclasped the plastic fastenings was sharp and loud. 

“You,” she said, voice low, “are a reckless asshole.”

There was that pulse again. Ticking in the base of his neck. 

She took a breath. “Why did you do it?”

He shifted. Like his ribs hurt, maybe. “Would you believe me if I said I just felt like letting off some steam?”

Marta knew him well enough to know she should pry. “You were angry,” she said. 

Ransom plucked at the edge of the comforter. “I’d rather not repeat what he said to me. If it’s all the same to you.”

She was truly, honestly confused. The only kind of insult that could get Ransom that angry was one coming from the mouth of his family, and they were all miles away. “Please tell me,” she said. 

A frown. “You’re mad at me.”

Marta closed her eyes. “I might be less mad,” she said, opening them, “If you just explained. 

“It was about you,” Ransom said at last. No smile, no frown. He was serious, and he was hurt. “Things I don’t want to say.”

Marta felt the surprise hit her in the center of the chest, bleeding slowly outward. “I…” his blue eyes. His bruised jaw. She gathered herself. “I didn’t know there was anything Ransom Drysdale wouldn’t say.”

A faint smile. “It’s nothing I haven’t said before, about other people,” he said. “I just don’t want to say it about you.”

Yes. They were probably friends. 

“Ok,” said Marta quietly. She stepped forward. He seemed to understand that she wouldn’t want to stand in the V of his legs: he drew them in toward the mattress, hooked his ankles together. She stood before him. “Don’t say it then.”

Quiet, as she opened the kit fully and spread it out on the bed next to his thigh. She pulled out antiseptic wipes, neosporin, a few bandaids just in case. 

She looked up at him. He hadn’t looked away yet. He was watching her like what he was thinking was too soft to speak aloud. 

“I’m not mad at you,” she said. Soft in her own right. She was, she thought, braver than him. 

He flickered another smile at her, even though it tugged his split lip. A smile with no teeth. “Christ,” he murmured, and she knew he would have touched her if he thought he could. She was sort of glad he hadn’t. 

Marta had to take a deep breath before she touched his face. This was different; this was uncharted territory. 

This was Ransom’s cheekbones, that bump on his nose, the sharp perfect line of his rich-boy jaw. This was his eyelashes: the only soft feature he had, feathered over the swollenness beneath his eyes when he blinked up at her, long and slow. 

“It might sting,” she said, and wondered why her voice came out on a whisper. 

He didn’t jump when she wiped the blood off of his chin. He didn’t jump when she wiped the place where one of his stitches had pulled. He didn’t jump when she wiped his puffed up eye. 

He jumped when she wiped the tear in his lip. 

“Sit still,” she murmured, automatic, built in her from years of suffering through squirming patients, from years of Harlan providing every possible distraction to avoid taking his goddamn medicine. She wiped it again, until the blood was gone, and he sat still this time. 

Neosporin next. Dabbed along his hairline, that place on his mouth. The scrape on his cheek. 

She wanted to run her cupped palm through the shocking-short hair clinging to his skull. It would be soft, Marta thought; he’d close his eyes when she did it. 

She shivered a little when his stubble rasped across the back of her hand. 

“Ok,” said Marta at last. She had put everything back in the kit and snapped it shut again, but she had not yet stepped back. Ransom’s face was tipped back to watch her. She let herself smile, contained but still there. “Good as new.”

Ransom held eye contact with her. “I think this might be as good a time as any,” he said, and his casualness was ridiculously see-through, “to try for that apology I hinted at.”

Marta’s hand was still on his jaw. She left it there, thumb sliding back and forth over unshaven skin in the rhythm of his inhales. 

She could have teased him. It would have been easy. 

Marta kept quiet. 

He laughed silently when she didn’t answer, just a huff of air. “Right. I’m.” A hesitation. His skin was always so warm, even here in that soft place by his ear. His voice died, a little. “I’m sorry, Marta.”

Marta smiled. She didn’t know if she forgave him, not quite yet, but it meant something, she thought, that he was trying. 

“Thank you,” she said, she would have said it whether or not she could lie. 

He seemed to understand. “Yeah,” he breathed. 

Ransom curled his fingers around her wrist for just a moment, squeezed so lightly that she almost didn’t feel. His hand dropped, and she caught it on the way down.

They were still for a while. She was touching Ransom with both hands, and his eyes were stuck on the weave of their fingers, and a car drove by and threw its headlights up against the back wall. 

He took a deep breath. His shoulders rose with it. When he sent a glance her way, he did it through those goddamn eyelashes, and if she didn’t know him at all she might say he looked almost nervous. She knew him, though. “Want me to sleep on the floor again?”

“Oh.” It took too long to realize he was joking. That amused him: the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes deepened. “That’s a waste of a good bed. And you just apologized, so.” 

“Jesus, Marta,” said Ransom. And then, “Ok. Ok.”

  
  
  


Eyes closed. 

It was like one of their phone calls all over again, one of the calls where neither of them spoke. Darkness behind her eyelids, and Ransom’s breath in her ear, clear even from across the room. 

Marta was surprised by how quickly she fell asleep. 

  
  
  


Marta awoke to sirens. 

It took her a moment to peel her eyes open. It was morning, she could tell that much: there was sunlight pushing against her eyelids with weighted heat, brushing the insides of her arms, the arch of her neck. 

They were very loud sirens. Sounded like they were right outside. 

She sat up. 

“What—” she began, glancing over at Ransom’s bed as she pushed hair out of her eyes. 

He wasn’t there.

“Oh my god,” she said. 

Marta scrambled out of bed, socked feet scraping against the rough carpet, and pushed open the bathroom door even though the light inside was off and the whole room was silent but for her. She knew he wasn’t here. She knew he wasn’t here, she just—didn’t want to believe it. 

Marta did not go outside, even though she wanted to. So badly did she want to. 

She pushed back a curtain with one finger, making a sliver of space just big enough to peer through with one eye. 

For a moment, they only thing Marta could see was winter-pale sunlight, and the blinding flash of red and blue lights. Then she blinked, and everything swam into focus. 

There he was. Dressed in the clothes he had come to her in, broken face and unshaven jaw. His hands were behind his back, secured firmly in silver cuffs, a cop on either side. He was looking down. 

She couldn’t go out there. They couldn’t know he’d been with her this whole time. He was going to be punished enough simply for not being at Linda’s house; he would never get out of prison if they knew he’d been states away with a woman he’d sort of tried to kill. 

Thank god Marta had parked her car around the back of the motel last night. 

Marta wondered if Ransom had turned himself in, or if the man from last night had called the police on them, or. Or. Or— 

Ransom looked up just then. Right at Marta. Marta didn’t try to hide. 

He smiled at her, very small, just once, as they pushed him toward the car and he ducked inside. 

And then they slammed the door shut and she couldn’t see him at all. 

  
  
  


Marta went home. 

**Author's Note:**

> should i proceed to the next circle of hell by writing a sequel? comment below if it strikes your fancy, or come berate me on [Twitter.](https://twitter.com/unicornpoe)


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